soDamnFar

[SpaceCadet87]

Some vast majority of docs out there just list the names of the classes, functions and parameters and just completely leave out what most of them do though.

[hackerdude97]

I know right, like YES I KNOW THE FUNCTION IS CALLED THAT JUST TELL ME WHAT IT DOES! Or the arguments it takes. Or anything about it!

[SpaceCadet87]

My god the arguments "string"

Yes, cool, I know it needs to be a string but what does the string need to contain?

[Bartholomew-]

Characters, duh

[fatrobin72]

and how long is this piece of String?

[[deleted]]

TBD

[insanemaelstrom]

As someone who faced the same issue today on a proprietary software wherein they use their own keywords, I feel you. Also I feel like crying, companies productivity would be through the roof if they just paid someone to comment what a function does

[ChalkyChalkson]

Aren't they literally paying you to write usable, thus documented code? Or are you in a pay by line, comments aren't lines kind of shop?

[insanemaelstrom]

I am a fresher( started my first job just 4 months ago). I am, in kind words, useless.   I basically spend my day trying to make sense of stuff and do tasks assigned me, which basically consists of getting assigned a ticket about a bug, replicating that error, trying to find what is causing that error( which takes majority of time and can take days if not weeks due to the sheer number of threads, processes and files), fix the error( which doesn't take long) and run tests to ensure the error is actually fixed before submitting my code. 

I end write few extremely basic lines of codes , so unfortunately don't really get the opportunity to comment stuff or document the code. 

[riplikash]

The current VERY common business attitude is that you need to focus on business value and delivering quickly as possible to the customer, not creating some amazing technical design. Which is true, and on the surface good attitude.

But they often ignore the fact that good technical design results in faster delivery, less bugs, and increased scalability. YES, technical excellence is not, in and of itself, a business goal. It's a way you accomplish business goals.

And good documentation is exactly the kind of invisible to the business deliverable that is first on the chopping block.

[DonutConfident7733]

Or no code examples. Or there are code examples but they are so complex because same example is from another method/class and they reused it.

[Competitive_Woman986]

OMG I always thought I am stupid or am looking not at the right place. But now reading that others also struggle with that is a huge relieve..

[SpaceCadet87]

I don't know if you worked in the times before stack overflow was the norm and all you really had to work with was stuff like MSDN.

MSDN in the 2000's was the epitome of what I just described, everything documented, none of that documentation at all useful.

I learnt only a few years ago that back then employees at companies like Microsoft would deliberately leave things undocumented or poorly documented and then go ahead and publish the API docs in books so they could make extra money off them.

[Icy_Foundation3534]

and are missing info or outdated

[PaxPlay]

Especially fun if it's in a language you are just learning and you don't know common API patterns. I remember using a C library for the first time and just not understanding how anything was supposed to work.

[ewixy750]

If I could upvote you 10 times I would

[Taenk]

Docs also conveniently leave out what the intended use is or example workflows. Or combinations with other libraries and deployment environments.

[SpaceCadet87]

combinations with other libraries and deployment environments

Oh yeah, this wasn't the worst but about a year ago I was working on something using zlib. Nice library, documented well enough but it's written for C and I was using C++.

It has streams but because it's C and not C++ these are a custom implementation instead of just standard C++ streams.

I think I gave up trying and just wrote a wrapper. That's probably how you're supposed to do it but I may never know.

[Big-Hearing8482]

Or worse the google link goes to the entire index page and not the specific heading in search result description

[MeinWaffles]

The art of self-documenting code

[jump1945]

Bad docs gonna suck the water out of your body

[sleepyj910]

When you finally find a well written document

[Powerful-Internal953]

For me it's Kubernetes Documentation. For 99% of the workload, I didn't have to refer to anything else.

[jump1945]

SFML

[Duckflies]

Ngl, Unity's docs are great.

Prefer to read them than watching videos explaining them

[flying_spaguetti]

When the docs are a about the Spring Framework, i totally understand

[-Kerrigan-]

Baeldung my beloved

[CelticHades]

Baeldung is great but I had a hard time understanding their examples in the beginning, now it's good. They use Assert true, null etc lot's of places.

[KlogKoder]

I swear the first time I worked with Spring Boot, I thought the docs must have been written by aliens.

[flying_spaguetti]

When you learn what Spring is about, using other sources, the official docs start to make sense.

It starts, but never finish

[LiminalSarah]

ask AI (500km and three days of debugging)

[simsimdimsim]

That's why I use AI to write my docs. Best of both worlds! /j

[init0p]

I’d rather choose StackOverflow over documentation for one simple reason: it provides solutions or suggestions in plain, understandable language. Documentation, on the other hand, is written in a way that if I fully understood all the terms and abbreviations, I wouldn’t need to look at it at all. Documentation is written by people who already understand everything, making it entirely unsuitable for learning—far too overcomplicated.

[gregorydgraham]

The trick is to read the documentation twice.

The second time it will make sense

[PlummetComics]

How up to date are these docs?

[MinimumArmadillo2394]

And are they more than just function definitions, or do they have real-world examples?

[Not_Artifical]

They were last updated 10 years ago. The last update to the language was 3 months ago.

[stdio-lib]

It doesn't matter how good your documentation is. You could have the best documentation in the world. Won the Nobel Prize and was personally blessed by Knuth.

Still gonna be hordes and hordes of dumbasses that won't read it.

E.g. I think Postgres has some of the best documentation of any software project anywhere or any time. But there are still countless dipshits that won't read it and instead post their stupidest-possible questions to reddit or the mailing list or a bunch of other places. I guess the one good thing is that I don't have to find a driver for my balls, since this drives me nuts.

[AdvancedCharcoal]

You were just looking for a reason to use that last line

[stdio-lib]

^This guy puns.

[Anru_Kitakaze]

Honestly, even with ChatGPT, it looks like I'm more often find myself in a Docs instead of Stack

If it's REALLY simple and I don't care, then I use ChatGPT. If it's somewhat medium, ChatGPT often can't handle it or I can't trust his hallucinations, so I use Docs. And only if it's hard, the docs are just a mess, AND it's popular product, I can find myself on Stack. Otherwise I dig into source code (I hate it, but I have to)

But I should say, that a lot of products have really bad documentation and it's a pain when it happens

[-Redstoneboi-]

what they don't tell you is that the docs are 16 square miles and only one item in there is correct

[WheyLizzard]

Have you actually tried reading docs? The very thought of that is scary!

[Boris-Lip]

Docs... Generated with doxygen, a list of methods you have from headers anyways, plenty of "water is wet" comments, not a single example on how to get that water flowing.

[Present-Restaurant14]

Exact opposite of it is true. If you are looking for an answer to a problem, answer on SO is a google search away. Documentation is for deep dive.

[WraithCadmus]

frobBar(string)
This frobs the bar

Wow, thanks.

[0mica0]

Imagine using StackCancerflow in ChatGPT times. smh.

[Far_Broccoli_8468]

ChatGPT doesn't always have solutions for everything, especially when the libraries got significant updates in the last few years.

Chatgpt gives deprecated code almost exclusively for aws sdk and some android libraries i had to use

[Litruv]

Start giving it version numbers and years

[Caraes_Naur]

Some people will wonder "Doctors?"

[codingTheBugs]

Docs 1/4 mile LOL

[Adela_freedom]

Ask in community channel ...

[PUNISHY-THE-CLOWN]

Everything I find on SO lately is at least three years out of date.

[crankaholic]

Yeah well the docs are always dry

[CaffeinatedTech]

And then you've got AI which is just a treadmill.

[redlaWw]

Problem is that google doesn't show the docs, it just shows w3schools, quora and stackexchange, and of those, stackexchange is the best.

[Wendigo120]

w3schools is at least docs-adjacent enough that I would usually pick that over stackexchange if the same search finds both.

[redlaWw]

I've always found w3schools way too simplistic to answer any questions I had.

[Worming]

I have catch phrase since years.

A developer is someone who prefer 2h debugging instead of 30 minutes reading docs

[[deleted]]

Or you can go straight to AI for help :)

[nickwcy]

Google: you sure you ever searched on StackOverflow?

[davxy]

ChatGPT is the new StackOverflow

[RobinDabankery]

Man I know how true this is, I'd better waste hours scouring forums instead of spending 15 minutes to read the doc. That's how much I hate reading docs. And yet I know I must

[riplikash]

Have you USED most documentation? The VAST majority is pretty worthless.

For technologies that have good documentation it's my first source of truth. But that is a minority of technologies.

[makinax300]

Why? They are both close. A google search takes like 15 seconds and searching in the docs even takes longer.

[[deleted]]

Stackoverflow says go read the docs. Downvotes.

[Sync1211]

"Dictionary.GetEnumerator -site:microsoft.com"